Friday, May 10, 2013

Acción Callejera

This semester,
we were challenged to make a lasting difference in our service sites as part of
the Emerging Leaders Program that we were participating in. We knew about it
from the beginning, but like normal college students, we put it off until the
last moment. As we struggled to come up with a good idea, we realized several
things:

The
first deals with our lack of planning and proactive actions. Do we need to have
consequences hanging over our heads in order to have the motivation to make
changes? As time was running out to come up with an idea and project, our goal
was to complete the task, not to make a lasting impact. It wasn’t being graded
and we weren’t super invested in the program, so we didn’t need to make it
perfect. We just had to get it done, and if it worked, it worked. This was very
different from the goal of the project. The hope was that we could use our
ingenuity and think outside the box to come up with different plans of action
to make an impact on those we serve. It could be little or big, but it was
supposed to be different than the norm, something to address the problems.

Here
comes the second realization: ingenuity takes time. In order to find a “solution,”
you first have to know the problem you’re addressing. We decided that leading
and following was something the boys struggled with. Because of their
backgrounds, many are very tough and don’t always like to follow the rules. We
wanted to provide a way to build their skills as both a follower and leader.
But good ideas don’t often come to you in 20 minutes. Unless you’re a natural
innovator, it takes time for an idea to be born and grow.

Finally,
we realized that things don’t always go as planned. Our boys love basketball,
so we ended up playing the game “HORSE” where one person decides where to shoot
from and the rest shoot from that location. If you miss, you gain a letter of
the word ‘horse.’ We were hoping that it would help the kids both follow after
those in front of them, and be leaders by keeping track of their own points.
However, the boys never fully understood the game, and instead of playing a fun
game, it ended up getting chaotic and even leading to fights.

Reflecting
upon our semester at Acción allejera and more specifically, our failure to
create and put forth a project that we were proud of, we have come to some
conclusions. To begin with, we believe that our EDP class should require us to
design and implement such a project as part of our service component. Along
with that, students should read articles, news, or books on the issue or
issues, which they face at their service sites, so that they may understand
exactly what they should be responding to. Their own research should prompt
them to not only go to their service site, but to make their service a part of
their life as much as possible. Finally, we believe that the project should be
sustainable and that it should attempt to address the root causes of the issue
or issues. We failed to understand the totality of the boys’ situations as
children working on the street, as children of Haitian immigrants or refugees,
as children who dropped out of school, and as children of lower social classes
of Dominicans. Essentially, the project should be a strong demonstration of the
students’ journey, which should include research, service, reflection, and
action.